 In his book The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin called divergence the driving force that creates a new species. Last week Amazon enhanced their Kindle range of e-readers, but also applied some divergence to the tablet market by extending in to a new sub-category of mobile tablet devices with the Kindle Fire. I think it's going to be huge and spell a lot of trouble for Android tablets from the likes of Motorola, HTC and Samsung, and probably BlackBerry's PlayBook too. Up to now these "me too" devices haven't put much of a dent in the Apple iPad's market leading dominance. This particular step by Amazon is a flanking move on Apple, but in itself it won't harm iPad sales much. Amazon is going to take a very strong position at the bottom end of the tablet market, and whatever their next step is things are getting interesting. Let me explain a little. Al and Laura Ries applied Darwin to marketing to explain how product categories diverge with their excellent 2004 book The Origin of Brands. In a follow on article for AdAge, Al wrote: "In Darwin's words, "nature favors the extremes." The "sweet spot" of a market is an illusion that soon .. ...
|
Some of you may know that Sir Ken Robinson is a hero of mine. His 2006 TED talk on education, that I've blogged about before, is inspirational. Track down and read his book Out of Our Minds. Until doing some research on another topic I had missed completely this October 2009 Toronto, Canada event at which he spoke - Artscape's third Creative Places + Spaces: The Collaborative City conference. Sir Ken talks about collaboration in the 21st century and creativity as an operational idea, which you can plan for and make happen systematically.
Here are some quotes from his talk: "Creativity is an operational idea. You can plan for it and make it happen systematically"
"We need to make innovation a habit"
"Politician's say the trouble is you can't define creativity, and I say the trouble is YOU can't! That's the problem"
"We need to teach creativity in education just like numeracy and literacy"
"It's a key operating principle for the next phase of development in the 21st century"
"Creativity Is a step on from imagination"
"it's applied imagination"
"Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value"
...
|
 How do you spread the word about the benefits of Cloud Computing beyond technology enthusiasts, web "savvy" geeks and industry insiders to the general business woman and man "in the street"? The likes of Microsoft and Salesforce are certainly trying to do that with some of their advertising campaigns, but I believe they are missing the target by a mile. A group of us have got together to try and amplify our voices with an initiative called Cloud Advocates. Let me explain with a bit of an advert, tell you about our first event and our tie up with Freshbusinessthinking.com. We are at the stage where Cloud Computing, from web based applications to on demand infrastructure, is just moving from being the next big trend to a mainstream technology choice. There are a plethora of events and announcements around the topic, and just to complicate things every technology provider is redefining whatever offering they've got as a Cloud solution. In the middle of all this noise we need some clarity on the topic. That is why Richard Messik and I decided to pool some of our marketing energy and form Cloud Advocates, an association of ...
|
 Last month I did a guest article for Jemima Gibbons monthly newsletter on Freshbusinessthinking.com about Social Media Monitoring and Analytics. In that same newsletter Nikki Pilkington argued why WordPress is a good choice for your website. I decided I wanted to argue, passionately, the opposite, and my article has just been published there this month. Here is the BTZ version. First I need to disclose that I'm a stakeholder in a particular CMS/Platform developer (author of WordFrame and PageTypes). However, I'll try and explain my case as objectively as possible. The first thing to say is that Nikki's article starts with a vital, core truth - whether your website is created by you, some experts in your team, website developers you've hired or an external agency, it needs a content management system (CMS) at its heart. You need to be in control of the content without needing technical expertise. You shouldn't be paying an agency or a developer every time you want to change a word, add a page, or move a menu option. But is WordPress the right CMS for your website? It's a blogging tool, not a CMS WordPress is great ...
|
Last week the IT industry had a major bombshell. HP announced it's intention to get out of the PC business, drop it's WebOS smartphone and TouchPad products and buy enterprise software company Autonomy. If you don't recognize Autonomy they are a major success story born out of research at Cambridge University. Founded in 1996 they now have a $7Bn market capitalization. They are all about the software infrastructure that manages structured and unstructured data. The headlines on their website tell the story - powering the World's largest Cloud at 31 Petabytes, 25,000 customers, deployed by 77% of Global 100, used by all of the top 10 global banks, 400+ of the world's largest software companies. They've made lots of acquisitions, but they produce solid recurring revenue. In buying them and dropping PCs, tablets and smartphones HP is dropping their consumer lines of business, reducing their dependence on hardware sales, and shifting focus back to the enterprise and software in particular.  On one level it's a great shame that they are discontinuing investment in WebOS and the TouchPad. We're in a post PC World and just this ...
|
 I was delighted to hear, early yesterday, that cloud accounting software provider Twinfield was acquired by Wolters Kluwer. I have to disclose that my company, D2C, have been Twinfield's UK partner since 2005 and so we have a vested interest in the success of the platform and some great customers and partnerships that have come as a result of our Twinfield connection. Over on the Twinfield blog, my good friend and one of the two Twinfield founders, André Kwakernaat, tells some of the back story and explains how proud he is. Let me give you my take on the acquisition from the perspective of someone who has been close to the story right from when Andre's idea started at the end of the 90s. Andre and the team really have done a superb job building the business since starting on 5 October 2000. Today the platform supports 80,000 companies, with 40,000 subscribers and used by over 700 accounting practices. Although the product operates every day in 23 countries, the bulk of the users are in their home market of the Netherlands, which has been both their strength in terms of growth, profitability and stability, but also a potential weakness. ...
|
 Careful with that spelling (for some reason I preferred it to Canute or Kanute). Here is my premise. I think, like Clay Shirky, that we are living in a period of transformation rivalling the changes in society triggered by the printing press, the telegraph, the telephone, photography, film, television, or the start of the Internet (web 1.0). The application of social media inside and outside of business is changing everything. However, since around 2009 some of us on the leading edge of this curve, who up to this point have talked about enterprise 2.0 or web 2.0 applied to business, have been drifting towards using the term Social Business to describe it. Language is important. For me that language is wrong. If I ask the average woman or man in the street what a social business is they would tell me about organisations with a social conscience, philanthropic goals and ethical conduct - micro-blogging, collaboration and social media monitoring wouldn't enter their heads.
|
 Last Thursday I sampled the latest incarnation of the London Bloggers Meetup, as organized by Andy Bargery and friends. This meetup has been running for years, but it was my first time. What sparked my interest was a combination of meeting Andy at a Social Medial Week London event in January, the sheer numbers that had signed up (167 at the time I booked on), and the chance to hear how Leo Babauta grew his Zen Habits blog to a readership of over 200,000. I think the other reason I went along is that I'm trying to find the atmosphere and energy of ideas in the melting pot that I used to feel way back in 2007 at OpenCoffee Club when it ran at a Starbucks Regent Street and then Waterstones, Piccadilly, or at The Tuttle Club from it's start early in 2008 and well in to 2010. I felt the same thing at CreativeCoffee Club sessions - where has it migrated to?
Although over 100 people packed in to the basement of The Long Acre for a noisy, lively event, that particular spark I'm looking for wasn't there at LBM. I saw but didn't get a chance to speak to a smattering of longstanding bloggers like Judith Lewis ( @JudithLewis on Twitter), Rachel Clarke ( . ...
|
 Back at the end of February I was struggling to complete a post about Social Media Week London, and I put a plea out to Twitter for some motivation (or to be shamed in to finishing it). @iamcreative aka Helen Harrop used her art as an incentive and promised me one of her doodle's if I published that day. I did, and the Doodle dooley arrived and appropriately it was about something called the Do Lectures, which had somehow passed me by completely. On investigation I discovered what initially looked like a kind of TED with a Welsh accent. A little more investigation showed that this was a gathering of speakers and people who can make change happen, sponsored in 2008 by Cardigan Bay clothing company howies out of their Earth Tax - they pledge to give 1% of their turnover or 10% of pre-tax profits (whichever is greater) to grass-root environmental and social projects. 2009 and 2010 have been funded by Wales. Attendees camp at fforest farm and the lectures have run in 2008, 2009 and 2010. The schedule for September 2011 just happens to be published today at 17:00. Their website tells me they were started from a conversation between David . ...
|
 Now look. I have a real problem with the term " Social Business" as it's being used by Dachis and IBM and others. However, let me put that to one side for another post later this week, but it's a thread that starts here and runs through my thoughts on the London edition of the Dachis Social Business Summit that Lee Bryant kindly invited me to this week. The venue (awesome architecture), agenda, speakers, food and organisation were all set at a very high standard, with the sole negative of conference wifi that didn't work. It's a social media conference. It's obvious that the majority of attendees are going to turn up with Macs, PCs, iPads and smart phones and want to live blog and tweet. When are venues and conference organizers going to realize that their normal bandwidth just won't cut it for us enterprise 2.0, social media types? ( Rant over, on with normal programming.) For me the conference highlights were the opening two sessions from JP Rangaswami (Salesforce.com's Chief Scientist) and John Hagel (Director of Deloitte and authour of The Power of pull). JP's " Nature Doesn't Do SLA's" used Zen style slides - small white . ...
|